Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.

Wednesday round-up and Open Thread

I’ve commented before that “sayings” from the Victorian era and before (e.g, “a stitch in time saves nine,” “idle hands are the Devil’s playground”) may have gone out of style, but their deeper truths remain constant. Listening to Obama’s crude gloating about the alleged 7.1 million Obamacare enrollments reminded me of yet another old saying: “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.” I confidently predict that signing people up under duress will prove to have been the easy part.

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When I got my new dog, I did a Cesar Milan (“the “Dog Whisperer”) refresher course by going out and reading his book, Cesar’s Way: The Natural, Everyday Guide to Understanding and Correcting Common Dog Problems. One of the main points Milan makes is that dogs are not our babies or, if they are our “babies,” that’s the last part, not the first part. First, dogs are animals; second, they’re the genus dog; third, they’re the specific breed; and only fourth are they our little snookums. You can say the same about people: First, people are animals….

When people are animals first, without having been trained into morality, sometimes you have to treat them non-verbally just as you would any other animal, right? Or as the friend who sent me this link asked, “Imagine how this story would have played out if the victim had successfully defended himself with the use of force? Once again, talking it out with your attacker doesn’t seem to solve the problem.”

Palestinians are again pushing the UN to recognize them as an official nation. Rick Richman has 12 good questions that, when answered honestly, indicate that the Palestinians aren’t a state. If I were categorizing them, I’d say they’re more along the lines of a criminal organization, like the mafia, only more violent.

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David Goldman approves highly of Caroline Glick’s proposal that Israel unilaterally implement a one-state solution encompassing some of the contested territories. It’s time, Glick and Goldman say, to align reality with the fact that the Palestinian population is not growing exponentially (all propaganda lies to the contrary), and that the territories are so terribly mismanaged that they cannot possibly be partners in a two-state solution. My friend Rob Miller, however, is not convinced that Glick’s plan is workable. He proposes an alternative one-state solution: “Israel should forget about the mythical two state solution, and simply delineate the borders it needs unilaterally,” presumably leaving fractious Palestinians on the other side of the border rather than bringing them back within Israel’s borders.

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John Scalzi, a Democrat, is struggling to figure out why he should vote for Matthew Guyette, who is the Democrat running opposite John Boehner. According to Scalzi, Guyette’s internet presence says nothing about Guyette or his positions. Instead, his entire campaign consists of insulting Boehner and Republicans. I admire Scalzi’s principled stand. I’m also a little bewildered as to why he’s asking that question at this particular junction. After all, in 2012, the greater part of Obama’s reelection campaign consisted of turning Mitt Romney, an imperfect candidate but, by all accounts, a very decent man, into a monster who strangled dogs with his bare hands, kept women captive in binders, engaged in gruesome homophobic attacks when he was a teenager in the 1960s, and left former employees to die in the streets from loathsome diseases.

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My father got his masters at San Francisco State University back in the 1970s. While it was an academically marginal institution then (as I believe it still is now), it was on the cutting age of campus antisemitism. My father, a veteran of two wars, wasn’t cowed by the violence and invective, but already then Jewish students responded to the Palestinian/Leftist aggression by falling silent. Stella Paul details how SFSU’s poisonous amalgam of PLO antisemitism and garden-variety Leftism has spread to campuses throughout America, infecting formerly genteel campuses that were once incubators for America’s society women. If you’d like to counter this dangerous trend, I recommend donating to StandWithUs.

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The Secret Service has been in the news for all the wrong reasons lately. It hasn’t been applauded for protecting the president and his family. Instead, it’s been highlighted for drunkenness and debauchery committed while on the job. Dan Emmett, a former Secret Service agent, says the problem isn’t that these guys are helpless alcoholics who are more to be pitied than censured. Instead, he says, the rot begins at the top with “weak leadership. There are too many incompetent managers who want the title, pay and perks of management while performing no duties of leadership. The problem is not bad Secret Service agents but bad leaders of Secret Service agents.”

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Some time ago, I wrote about the new “racism” nonsense called “cultural appropriation.” The theory is that it’s racist for white Americans to emulate other cultures, even if they do so admiringly. I came across that story because an Asian friend of mine posted it on Facebook, along with the opinion of a prominent Asian friend of hers holding that cultural appropriation is a bad thing. She and her Asian friends were all offended. Funnily enough, though, in a new Facebook thread, this gal and all of her Asian friends have examined their navels and concluded that there was nothing offensive about Stephen Colbert stooping to use cheap Asian stereotypes to make an anti-Republican political point. Michelle Malkin is not so forgiving, since she points out that Democrats are the party of anti-Asian racial stereotypes which they routinely use, not for satirical purposes, but to score points against Asians.

Please, please tell me that the Asians will be smarter than my fellow Jews and that they will soon turn against the Democrats and embrace small government conservativism.

Scalzi needs to shut his damn mouth and vote Democrat as he is told to.

After 08 and 12 of obeying Democrat propaganda and attacking the rest of us, he doesn’t have a damn excuse any more. When I see his face, it’ll be over.

The little shi will get his. I will personally see to that.

http://ymarsakar.wordpress.com Ymarsakar

Now that that intense burst of “dislike” is over, I do wonder why I like seeing Scalzi in a burning vat of acid more than I care about David Brin, whom I’ve actually conversed with in an argument. It is strange. I think I remember reading one of Scalzi’s blog posts in 2008, before the election, and I became so disgusted by the Leftist aristocrat in question that I couldn’t deal with it other than by running away. It must have balled up with the various other frustrations at the time, as people paid attention to meaningless elections and ignored all the important dots they should have connected together, given the Left’s century long war against humanity.

I’ll try to dig up that blog thread, which I didn’t even post a comment at. Something about it really really put Scalzi on my personal list. Or maybe it was the comments in the blog, a cess pit of Leftist rapists and righteous child molestors, if I’ve ever seen one (and I’ve seen plenty).

Only clue I found was that date, a comment about the event itself. It doesn’t explain what it was I read though or link to it and since I didn’t leave a comment, I can’t find it on google. That’s annoying. After looking through 5 pages of Scalzi’s blog archives, I can’t find anything from October – November 08, so I give up.

But it’s good to know that level of hostility is waiting for him. I myself wasn’t aware of it before now.

shirleyelizabeth

I enjoy Fallon. For about the past year I’ve been putting his episodes on while I do housework. He’s not completely offensive to those with conservative sensibilities, and he’s a very clever guy. He likes to just keep the fun in things. That said, he does take a lot more shots at conservative politicians/politics than his few spare jokes about the other side. I can’t say if it comes from his personal convictions, or his writer’s convictions, or if they’re just writing towards the more liberal late night/New York crowd.

http://ymarsakar.wordpress.com Ymarsakar

“Once again, talking it out with your attacker doesn’t seem to solve the problem”

It’s just like diplomacy. Whether people will listen to you depends on how high strung they are and whether they respect/fear you. So a difference between Hussein and Bush II would change how people react to the same sentence.

If a target is angry at you and you try to negotiate him down and calm him down, generally that doesn’t work unless you yourself have a bag of tricks that guarantees your safety and the target’s elimination. If you don’t, then you’re just bluffing, patronizing the fool, and he can see/smell your fear and hesitation. Same thing with dogs. You can pretend to be “in charge” by throwing a tantrum, running around with the dog leash like a chicken with its head cut off, or you can communicate a command and its consequence with merely one look, body language. Words and logick do not penetrate certain armors like Leftist defenses. Dogs generally don’t listen to you if you are angry or upset. You’re communication the opposite of what you desire, which is to send the command authority line. An upset or loud human is just a barking beta dog that’s scared of everything and needs a Strong Alpha Dog to protect it. In that power vacuum, without a designated leader of the pack, your dog then assumes the mantle of responsibility. Some are capable, others are not; they break under the strain, bite people, get nervous, become neurotic, and then must be euthanized.

So first of all, if you want to talk to someone, ensure that they remain at the right distance. That distance is not with their fist in your nose. If you don’t understand “distance”, then you have no bag of tricks that can make the target respect you. You’re just a lily livered coward that he’s going to punish for X, Y, and Z.

An animal and a human can sense emotions. At least the empathetic or psychopathic ones can. To calm a target down, you must control fear and reduce your own frustration/anger quotient. That cannot be done if you are worried about getting slugged in the face.

I don’t believe angry kids should have to go to jail. I think you just put them in a deathmatch arena and have them beaten into a disc by a stronger foe. That will, if anything, teach them the true meaning of violence and the benefit of peace. Somewhat Spartan in harshness, but Western decadence needs some stiffening up here. Those that understand the language of violence but not of peace, cannot be counseled until they either understand the language of peace…. or you speak to them in the language of violence. One can avoid reinforcing a criminal’s belief that violence is everything, by forcing the criminal to negotiate. That is only feasible though if the criminal thinks using violence won’t work against you, though. Hence, deathmatch arena. The idea that force alone will reformat a person is difficult to maintain. When you bend a tree using force, it tends to snap back twice as strong. It takes monstrous levels to bend a tree permanently, and generally that kills it.

jj

ShirleyElizabeth: for years and years and years and years NBC would not allow Steve Allen, Jack Paar, or Johnny Carson to (a) have political guests, or (b) make political jokes. The reasoning was very simple: no matter what you say you’ll offend half the audience, and since we’re here to make money we don’t intentionally offend people. And we will not even appear to endorse anybody by allowing him/her on our air, so don’t even ask.

Carson got that changed in 1966 – right before he got a lot of other things changed as a result of the AFTRA strike in 1967. A little smidge of history. The toughest job in television during the 1960s may well have been talent coordinator on Tonight. What does a talent coordinator do? That’s the person who finds and interviews the guests. Carson was a genius, but he was a very narrowly defined genius, who was only a genius when he was on his rails. Most of the time when you go somewhere as a guest, your host will – at least somewhat – exert himself to put you at ease. Not on Tonight in Carson’s first twelve or fifteen years. On Tonight it was the job of the guests to put the host at ease. The magic word was “rapport,” and if you wanted to guest on that show you had to have it. And nobody could quite define it, either, which made it tricky. It meant, as near as anyone could ever tell: you wouldn’t bomb, you wouldn’t monopolize, you wouldn’t be unpredictable (you’d talk about what you said you were going to talk about and NOTHING else – unless Carson led you there), you’d be easy for Carson to play to, play with, and feel easy and relaxed with. You think finding these people was easy? It was not. Finding people for Carson to work with was always a huge problem for the Tonight staff. By 1966 there were so many people in the entertainment world Carson wouldn’t work with that he and Art Stark (his producer) went to NBC and begged to be allowed to book political guests, and make political jokes. The network didn’t wish to do this, but bowed to the reality that Carson would have the same 150 people on year after year if they didn’t. Thus politics entered the Tonight Show. And again: it was only the politicians who would submit to an interview ahead of time, tell the anecdotes and jokes they planned to tell ahead of time to the talent coordinators, accept help from the professional writers, and avoid topics the TCs told them to avoid.

For example, there is the story you probably all know: the Barry Goldwater interview in 1966. In the course of talking with Goldwater, Carson tripped over a sentence. “Did that ever happen to you?” he asked Goldwater, “when you just can’t get out what you mean?” “Yes,” Goldwater replied, “for three and half months two years ago.” Big laugh. Huge laugh. Looked spontaneous, sounded spontaneous. The whole thing had been worked out: Carson’s tripping over a sentence, his question to Goldwater, and Goldwater’s punch line, a couple of hours earlier by associate producer Rudy Tellez in the preliminary interview.

By the time we arrived in the mid-70s and 80s, Carson was at last feeling comfortable on his own set, and things relaxed – at least on the show – a fair amount, but his first decade was a real struggle to get him settled in. He was not easy. Things changed a lot after the strike in 1967, and changed more as he did in fact mellow into a level of confidence in himself.

But that’s where the political stuff came from. Leno and Fallon don’t spend an inordinate amount of time in that arena, but they do go there. And they are of course both rather typical liberals, Leno a bit less than Fallon; but neither of them has ever voted for a republican in his life. That’s the world in which they live: Letterman’s a liberal, so’s Arsenio, so’s Ellen: they all are. Part of the deal.

Actually, I was just being facetious. White, English-speaking people don’t seem to get upset when others appropriate our culture. I suppose, because we’ll just make more, only better.

Assuming we can keep those who prefer other cultures from undermining the whole freedom idea. One supposes, those people prefer being subjects or, more likely, they wrongly believe they will be royals.

http://ymarsakar.wordpress.com Ymarsakar

Generally nationalists and those who consider their culture supreme or efficient, will see it as a compliment if others copy it.

http://ymarsakar.wordpress.com Ymarsakar

I found something of note. It wasn’t what I was looking for on old Scalzi boy here, but it should suffice.

They were talking about something similar back in 08, except it had to do with Palin and her family/daughter. I think I compiled all of them together, put them under Scalzi, and told me I’d get them later.

You might want to backtrack on that stance just a little bit, considering it is Scalzi here. Principled? Standing?

Hmmmmm

SADIE

I saw this in my inbox and wanted to share it with one and all. I couldn’t help but think that a couple of really crappy state run healthcare sites could have covered the cost in the blink of an eye.
The Army’s Spectacular Hidden Treasure Room –

However, there are major fundraising hurdles to jump before the museum can be built. The foundation’s president recently told the Washington Post that it has raised $76 million of the $175 million required for the museum and predicts the museum could open in 2018. The plan is to build the museum at Fort Belvoir.